Shane

One of Caden’s best friends, the inimitable 16-year-old still has the sass and bravado that defines her, but it is a front for an underlying fear of what could happen next.

From Interitas Volume 2: False Prophets

As they walked down the quiet, tree-lined streets toward the Colonial Park Cemetery, Shane wondered how it was possible that someone could go from fearless to perpetually frightened in such a short amount of time. Before the incidents of last year, when a supernaturally charged bad guy and his army of minions had tried to kill Caden and everyone around her, Shane could count the number of times she had been truly, genuinely frightened on one hand. There was the time when she was four when the family sedan got broadsided by a drunk driver in an SUV, causing it to spin violently before coming to a stop on the sidewalk. When she was nine, her babysitter Mrs. Walters collapsed while they were playing a board game. The school shooting, of course. That was pretty much the definition of terrifying.

But most of the time, Shane was immune to the limitations that being scared placed on most people. Some in her life thought it was an act—a pretense of false bravado designed to keep her in the alpha dog position at all times—but that wasn’t the case. Things that would paralyze others didn’t even faze her, whether it be the normal phobias like heights and spiders to the more ingrained human reactions to physical or emotional threats.

Shane Carpenter was as close to fearless as you can get. Or at least she used to be.

Ever since the madness of 2014 had revealed that pretty much everything she ever knew or thought or believed was not necessarily true—that there really were such things as ghosts and demons, that people can be corrupted, that evil not only exists but flourishes—fear had been her nearly constant companion. She woke up scared, she spent most of the day looking over her shoulder, and she went to bed trying to keep one eye open.